This Small Solar System Body is around 5km in diameter and has been suggested as a possible extinct comet nucleus. It is certainly the parent body of the Geminid meteors.

Last night it made a close pass to Earth: some of the newspapers called it a "near miss", although it never got closer than 6 million miles. But in 2093 it is predicted to approach within 2 million miles.I managed to get some images of it yesterday evening, between the patchy clouds. I found that it was moving so quickly that it was trailing badly in 60-sec exposures, so I ended up using 15-sec with 2x2 binning on my old Starlight-Xpress HX916 camera.

I'd programmed their high-tech mount to track the target body rather than the background stars, which it has done very successfully. The modulation in the intensity of the star-trails is due to wispy cloud.

As usual, I used IRIS to align and process the individual frames:I used the LOG2 command (for the first time), to do a logarithmic histogram-stretch on the whole sequence;then PIC2BMP to produce a series of 100x .BMP files;then I used the Batch Conversion in IrfanView to make these all into .GIFs;next I used unFREEz to produce an animated GIF;and finally the EZGif online video converter https://ezgif.com/gif-to-mp4 to make the .MP4 version.

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